When selling a product, a lot of people make the mistake of developing their product first, and then trying to find a market for it. Of course, the process should be reversed.

Find a market first that spends money, then find out what they want and give it to them.

It is certainly easier said than done, but there are a lot of places online where you can do your market research for free. They’ve done most of the work for you already. You just need to know where to go and what to do to connect all the dots.

Let me show you the process I go through when I’m trying to brainstorm for ideas.

For starters, I’m always aware of trends and current events in the real world. I read several newspapers each day, many magazines, both general and niche-specific, I watch the news, I listen to the radio. Occasionally something that I hear or read will stick with me. I may record my thoughts on my portable voice recorder; jot down some notes, whatever happens to be convenient for me. Sometimes I’ll call my office voice mail and leave myself a message.

But at some point I’ll have several broad ideas to research. I want to look deeper. And I want to make sure there is a good market for them before I even think about creating a product.

So I’ll begin completing the following steps:
Google Zeitgeist-
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

To begin with, I check out the hottest search trends at Google Zeitgeist. If I am targeting the US market, I’ll click on “U.S. Zeitgeist,” otherwise I’ll look at “Zeitgeist Around the World.” At this point I am just looking for ideas.

If I see that a particular topic is hot, I’ll make a note of it and look at more targeted sub-niches later on at more specialized sites (which I’ll show you shortly).

Clickbank – http://www.clickbank.com
Yahoo! Buzz – http://buzz.yahoo.com
eBay Pulse – http://pulse.ebay.com
Dummies – http://www.dummies.com/

The eBay Pulse site is a great place to start looking at sub-niches. What I will do is select the category first (using the topics I’ve gathered from looking at the previous sites), then look for profitable sub-niches by then selecting a sub-category.

The best chance for success is if I am as specific as possible with my niche selection. In the example below, I don’t want to sell to the “crafts” niche.
I want to sell to grandmothers who enjoy giving their latch rug hooking gifts to their families and friends. Whatever. You get the idea.
 
Also, I’ll always check the largest stores as well to see what they’re selling. There has to be a reason they are the largest stores. They must be doing something right.

Just because a sub-niche is popular doesn’t mean people spend money on it.
Amazon – http://www.amazon.com

Amazon is a great place to see what currently exists for any given sub-niche.

Chances are, the more books there are written on that subject, the more that market spends on those topics.

Follow these steps and you’ll be well on your way to discovering in-demand niches that have the ability to make you money!

One thing that I like to do even before checking Google though is to go to Yahoo Answers and search for variations of my keyword. This will tell me what problems people are having and what kind of solutions are being given to them.

If you pay really close attention you will pick up a couple great titles for articles and a list of different things that you can write about. However, in this case because we have been using the keyword “relationship problem advice”  what we are going to do right now is head on over to http://answers.yahoo.com and type in a variation of our keyword, for now we will stick with “relationship problem”. One of the first threads I see is:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AjfoHesso6OOjY6FoiHn_40jzKIX;_ylv=3?qid=20070818194709AAXJlYM

 The title of the post is:

“How is ignoring someone ever a good solution to a relationship problem”

Just from the title of the post alone, I can come up with a couple of article titles right off the top of my head.

Relationship Problem Advice – Will Ignoring The problem Make It Go Away?

Relationship Problem Advice – Why Ignoring The Problem Will Not Help Your Relationship

Do you see what I am doing here? I am letting people that are having problems in this area of their life determine what my content is going to be.

Why?

I do it this way because there is not a whole lot of guess work. I do not have to wonder whether or not my content is something that people will want to read. People are already telling me that they are searching for this type of information to help them in their lives and their relationships.

Lets take a look at the next question and do the same thing. Even though this might seem repetitious on my part, I want to be absolutely certain that by the time you are done reading this guide you will be able to put it aside and carry all of these steps out on your own easily and with confidence that you are doing it correctly.

The next thread that I see is this one:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AlQMMtUPl.5kDStTIA7a92MjzKIX;_ylv=3?qid=20070621211850AAsZP0b

The title of the question is, “what can I do to resolve this distance relationship problem”

Again, right off the bat a couple of different article titles come to mind.

Relationship Problem Advice – Is A Long Distance Relationship For You?

Relationship Problem Advice – How To Make A Long Distance Relationship Seem Close

Do you see what is going on? I could literally spend hours in Yahoo Answers and come up with 100 article titles and different problems that need to be addressed in this niche.

 
Now that we have a couple article titles, the next thing we have to do is come up with content for the articles. This is what I like to use Google and my own life experiences for.

You can also read other articles that are in circulation and put your own spin on things. I know that when I read almost any article, when I am done, I have ideas for how I could expand that topic in three different directions. This does take a little bit of creativity on your part, but the more you do it, the easier it will come to you.

We now know how to come up with content to write about, so it is time to put it into action. A couple pages forward in this article we are going to set up our virtual real estate, but before we do that, we
are going to need some fresh and interesting content to put on it. The initial content that you have to create is kind of extensive, but keep in mind that you are opening up a new niche so there is some legwork involved. Don’t let it scare you away, if you do, you will be stuck in the same ruts that you find yourself in now.

This is what you are going to need:
 1 unique article of about 600 words
 3 rewrites of your 1 unique article
 2 unique articles of about 300 words
 3 rewrites of each of the 2 articles above

So, what we are doing is writing a total of 3 unique articles and then rewriting each of them 3 times. If you are creative and can come up with all unique articles and do not have to rewrite anything, thats great! That is always an option, but what I am doing here is trying to make it as easy as possible to get started.

There are also other ways to come up with content. You can look for PLR material that relates to your niche or you can even outsource the article writing all together. If you decide to go the PLR route, make sure that you completely rewrite the entire article so that it is unique to only you.

Once you have all of your content ready to go, make sure that you save it. I recommend to start a new folder for each one of your niches. This will help you stay organized and allow you to find everything quickly and easily.

When you plug the keyword into Google using quotation marks, there are a couple of things that you want to take note of.

 What kind of sites are ranking high (are they authority sites?)
 How many Adwords campaigns are being run (pay attention)
 How many competing sites without quotation marks

The first bullet point above is probably the most important. This is true because it is going to be our goal to take over their position if they are on the first page of Google. Therefore, we have to see exactly how strong they are. This will tell us how much work we will have to put in for us to rank well there a firefox plugin I use called SeoQuake
which I recommend for this purpose but im not going into that now.

One of the best indicators to me can be found by using Yahoo Site Explorer. Basically, we will be able to find out exactly how many links the site has coming in and exactly where they are coming from.

For the purpose of an example lets go back and use the keywords from the relationship niche that we found earlier.

One of the first keywords we found was “relationship problem advice” so, lets take a look at exactly what Google will tell us so that we can analyze it a little bit further.

When you plug the keyword into Google with quotation marks it shows that there are 6,970 competing sites at the time of this post Now, take a look at the Adwords Ads that are running. 100% full page of ads on the side and at the top.

So far, we are looking real good. We have low competition and 21 people are spending money to get traffic from this particular keyword.

Lets take it a step further though and analyze what the sites that already have top billing have going on. We are going to do this by analyzing what kind of links they have coming in and where they come from.

To do this, we are going to use Yahoo Site Explorer. So, open Yahoo up in a different tab. Make sure that Google is still open with the information regarding the keyword “relationship problem advice”

The first site you should see is www.links2love.com/advice.htm go ahead and open that site up and you will see that the site does not really offer any good content. Honestly, it looks like it is set up to generate income through Adsense. So, we should be happy about that.

Copy the URL and click over to your Yahoo tab. Once there we are going to see how many links the site has by putting it in the Yahoo search bar in the following format:

http://www.links2love.com/advice.htm

Hit enter, what you see next usually is a bad sign. It is showing that the site has over 4,000 links pointing to it. However, in this case, if you look close enough they are all internal links. This means that pretty much all of the links are coming from other pages on the site. Usually when I see that, I take that as a good sign.

After evaluating the first site, I’m not too worried. I’m fairly confident with a little bit of work, that first spot is attainable and I could have it with some patience.

Take a look at the second competing result in Google and lets analyze it the same way. The site you should be looking at is www.couplescompany.com when you plug it into Yahoo in the same way we just done previously, you will see that it has over 2,000 links pointing to it. However, again most of the links are coming from within the site with the exception of a couple of directories.

Another site with a couple thousand links pointing to it is not exactly what I wanted to see. However, because of where the links are coming from, I’m not that worried about it either.

Just to do a little more investigation, lets do the same thing with the third site on the front page of Google. The URL that you should see is a URL within www.askmen.com when you run it through site explorer you will see that there are 11,139,699 links pointing to it.

The fourth competing site has 143 the same stats as the rest.

From everything I have seen this is a keyword that I feel comfortable attacking with a fair amount of certainty that I can not only rank on
the first page of Google, but that I can rank high on the first page. Therefore, I am going to put it aside as a good keyword to go after.

You are going to want to go through this process for each of the keywords that you have compiled. Make sure that you do this!

Incomplete or sloppy research very well could hurt you in the long run.

Once you get it down, it shouldn’t take you any longer than a couple of minutes per keyword and you will be done a lot faster than you think. Even though it might seem tedious, this is part of the ground work that you lay down to ensure that your campaign is successful.

No matter what you do, do not skip what we have talked about in this section. If you do, you could end up wasting a ton of time on keywords that are unattainable or even worse spending time ranking well for a keyword that is not profitable.

Bum strategy is a great way of setting up a web presence for the budget conscious niche marketer.

Since Bum Marketing is the strategy that I use and because I am a technological moron, I choose to set up and use all free sites. There are plenty of them out there and they are both easy to get going and easy to update.

These are the sites that I use:

1. www.blogger.com
2. www.hubpages.com
3. www.wordpress.com
4. www.squidoo.com

Now, if you are more technically inclined you can substitute Squidoo for your own site on your own hosting, or even better still set up your lens with Squidoo and use it for a little more linking power. Read the rest of this entry

Keyword research is one of the most important things that we do online. It can be very time consuming depending on how deep you need to go in order to get keywords that you are happy with, but it is well worth the effort and will pay a great return if done correctly.

The most important thing that we need in order to do effective keyword research is a keyword tool. For the purpose of this guide I am going to be using WordTracker’s free tool, due to the fact that everyone has access to it.

Before we start though, it is important to understand that for the most part these tools make guesses at the results that they give. For example, in one niche that I am in, all of the keyword tools that I have used said that a particular keyword was only getting 1 search a day. This is funny to me, because I currently get 30 visitors a day to one of my sites based on that keyword. The point I am trying to make is there is a little bit of wiggle room in the results that you get.
Read the rest of this entry

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